I made the suggestion before, but I think it worth repeating. As we already have an IFRAME used for the ad at the top of the screen, would it be a hugely provocative move to make the CB a IFRAME as well?.

Done this way, a click on the talk button would only need to refresh the cb, which should a reduced load on the server by not having to re-build the entire page with associated DB hits etc. ?

I can't connect to any IRC-Server here because of a firewall, too. Only have a http/ftp-proxy available so Chatterbox is really fine for me, it's the only "Chat-Thing" I have here at work...it's my connection to the outer world from here don't take it away! :))

But if it causes so much load on the server, maybe a seperate CB-Server should do the job?

Finally, a CB->IRC interface would have the advantage that a single XML ticker polling client can have any number of users listening. Actually, jcwren has already written one: Robomonk - An IRC to PM Bridge. You just have to launch it onto some IRC server. (Don't bother with the demo mentioned there, it's been offline for a while now.)

Going whole hog and running exclusively on IRC would be a mistake IMO. The XML feed was set up to allow lightweight external access - make use of it!

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other